NOWHERE TO HIDE (2000)
Grade: B
Director: Lee Myung-Se
Screenplay: Lee Myung-Se
Starring: Joong-Hoon Park, Dong-Kun Jang, Ahn Sung-Ki
NOWHERE TO HIDE is a constant frenzy of activity. Its opening inter-cuts between two police busts that materialize into stylish stop-motion fights set to a pounding techno beat. The movie continues in this manner, thrashing at us with its restless inventiveness, and there is a story but we get the feeling that it's mostly filler in between the director's stylistic experimenting. The entire film is window dressing, but most of it happens to be creative enough to keep us interested. Only during the third act do the proceedings begin to become repetitive.
The plot concerns two archetypal buddy cops attempting to apprehend an elusive assassin. In order to get to him they spend the entire running time hunting down his henchman in exuberant chase sequences that are occasionally inspired and sometimes just tedious. The central character is the classic renegade cop figure, Woo (Joong-Hoon Park), a swaggering anti-hero with a drooping defiant face and jaw jutted out like a Dick Tracy villain. This character is familiar to us by now, but writer\director Lee Myung-Se and Park make him charismatic enough. Woo is a loser who has tried his hand at a plethora of blue-collar jobs before finally becoming a cop. He flaunts his job, letting the role of rogue officer of the law seep into his lifestyle---we always see him with a smooshed-in detective hat and he keeps up his tough guy illusion by drinking and smoking to excess. I like the way he threatens his enemies; always with a mock polite smile like a schoolyard bully squeezing the utmost degree of enjoyment from his foe's pain. Woo seems melancholy when he's not surrounded by the harshness of the dangerous world he thrives on. We learn that he avoids his family and we see his barely livable apartment. None of that matters because he has separated himself from the doldrums of that existence. It isn't as exciting as the thrills his job offers.
His partner (Dong-Kun Jang), the rookie by the book cop is less interesting. He supplies us with a cold voice over and mostly looks vacant as if he's there to fill a role rather than inhabit it. But it doesn't really matter. The movie, as its generic action junk title would lead you to believe, is about pursuit and the different manners and styles such an activity can be filmed.
We've all seen foot chases set to rock music, but in NOWHERE TO HIDE we get one so off the wall it's like Buster Keaton directing RUN LOLA RUN with the cop and bad guy in such close proximity that it becomes something like subtle slapstick. Some fight scenes are glimpsed only in shadows on a wall; others turn into silly waltzes. There are scenes at the end that try to get emotional after all this cartoon nonsense. They are a mistake, and kept thankfully brief.
Everything is drenched in mood. A particularly powerful moment of stylistic masturbation stands out; a Bee Gees tune plays over a rainy assassination with a complete absence of ironic comment. The cheesy 70's tune is actually used for emotional effect rather than annoyingly playful look-how-clever-I am-to-use-this-song-in-a-violent-death-scene-ma! It's probably the most hypnotizing scene in the movie.
NOWHERE TO HIDE feels like a throwback to the so called "right wing reactionary" cop movies of the 60's and 70's like THE FRENCH CONNECTION and DIRTY HARRY in which the police officers are as brutal in their methods as the criminals. The difference is that it's shot like an impressionistic art film. The formula is tweaked because of the director's insistence on finding new ways to film old broken down genre standbys; we've all seen movies where a cop must stroll into a pulsating dance club in order to get to suspect. Here we only get a sense of the scene; the cop enters and the director cuts to a flashing light, superimposing quick severe black and white drawings of the goings on (as if in a graphic comic book). It's established so quickly that the scene hardly exists on film yet its essence makes its way into our cortexes. The picture is a cluster of comic book, music video, Japanese animation and off the wall avant guard. At times it feels like an accomplished directors attempt at something resembling a student film, at other times its invigorating and exciting; by the end I was just plain worn out. But in a good way.